Hayes, Paula Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice (1433115247)
Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice returns to the poet’s early works, such as
Land of Unlikeness and
Lord Weary’s Castle, in search of a relationship between Lowell’s early poetry and his turn to a confessional style of writing in the 1950s. Lowell’s early poetry is often overshadowed by the emergence of his confessional poetry (that develops in
Life Studies; however, instead of Lowell’s early poetry being eclipsed by
Life Studies, a remembrance of his early poetry is necessary as a way of understanding Lowell’s evolution as a poet. The early poetry provides readers and scholars of Lowell with a Puritan paradigm and the ethos of an American narrative that Lowell never fully abandons but only perpetually deconstructs.